Posts by DailyLlama

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Hard hats

At my last job, we had a room with all the HVAC ducting in it, and as such everyone was required to wear hard hats when in it. The problem was that the ducting was 6'3" off the floor, and being 6' I could walk under it safely, until I put a hard hat on, after which I was continually banging the hat on the ducting.

Sadly logic doesn't factor in these rules, and as the tallest person in my team (only my manager was taller than me) I tried to get other people to go into that room instead...

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Re: Peripherals

Yes, but the notes were shredded for security purposes.

IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups

Once had a similar thing with a laptop whose keyboard had not been installed correctly, and the delete key was in the top right corner. Every time the lid was closed with the device running, and Outlook open, all of the user's emails vanished...

After several people had looked at it, and recovered all the messages, they finally brought it to me, and after discounting the hackers or the malware, I just pushed the keyboard into place and voila, problem solved.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

We had a complete technophobe of a marketing director, back in around 2002, who never used his computer. He'd always come to us to dictate emails (despite none of us being secretaries), and when we asked him why, he complained that his computer was really old and slow. And to be fair, it was the last 486 in the building, so we ordered him a shiny new Pentium 3.

When it arrived, I took out his old computer, and he took the opportunity to rearrange his office a bit. Meaning that the new computer was now too far from the network port, and I needed to get a new cable. We didn't have any of the right length in stock, so I ordered some new ones, and told him that I'd be back to install the cable in the next couple of days.

Things happened, there was a weekend, and it was 6 weeks before he came back to me to say that his new computer didn't work... SIX WEEKS!

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

A better story than Bandersnatch!

Bosses face losing 'key' workers after forcing a return to office

No, because I don't have them. Some of the guys in my team like to come to the office to get away from all that at home, and I understand that, but surely the choice should be ours? I work better at home without any interruptions, they work better in the office, with fewer interruptions.

I genuinely don't mind being in the office, it's just the complete waste of time and effort of sitting in traffic for an hour before and after work that bothers me.

When I WFH, I don't have to get up until 8:45, and when I finish at 6, I am already at home, and ready to cook a proper dinner. At lunchtime I can get on my exercise bike and knock out a quick 10km, have a shower and a sandwich and get back to work within the hour.

I can't do any of that in the office, and I can't not take the lunch hour to leave early, so I sit and read a book, as it's a lot safer than wandering the mean streets of Uxbridge.

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

We had a similar one: Wireless Ethernet between buildings that got interrupted every Tuesday morning. When the car dealership across the road took delivery of new vehicles, and the transporter parked in the middle of the road to unload.

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

Re: I need my local printer

We had a user who complained that her local printer (on the desk opposite hers) was too far away, and she'd hurt her back stretching to get printouts from it. So Health and Safety asked me to have a look at it (knowing that I was a curmudgeon)... I duly went to the office, inspected the printer and the layout of the office, and noting that there was a huge networked MFD in the same room, I removed the local printer so that she would have to stand up and walk to the other one, thus preventing her injuring herself further.

Student requested access to research data. And waited. And waited. And then hacked to get root

Re: In Code We Trust

Yep, I used it when I was at a site migrating PCs from the old company domain to our one (having purchased their company) and realised after the first reboot that I'd forgotten to change the local admin account password, and therefore couldn't log on to join to the new domain...

EU mandated messaging platform love-in is easier said than done: Cambridge boffins

Someone...

hasn't read the other post about boffins today!

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/29/scientists_boffins/

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

People aren't Hardware or Software, so it must be a Meatware problem...

New IT boss decided to 'audit everything you guys are doing wrong'. Which went wrong

Obvious troll is obvious...

'What's the point of me being in my office, just because they want to see me in the office?'

Re: Contract clauses

My "office hours" have not changed while I've been working from home. My work laptop lives in my spare bedroom/office, and does not come out of there unless I'm going to the physical office building.

I do not go into that room before 9am, or after 6pm. Those are my contracted hours, I do not get paid overtime, thus no overtime happens.

UK comms regulator rings death knell for fax machines

Much loved???

By who?

PC component scavenging queue jumper pulled into line with a screensaver

I did exactly the same

to a colleague who had been to watch Man Utd lose the Champions League final to Barcelona.

I got approval from our manager first, and he was just as big a joker as me, so happily went for it.

He eventually asked me how to get rid of it after seeing the grinning Barcelona team as his wallpaper for two weeks.

BOFH: You want presentation layer, but we're physical layer

"They say they brought their MacBook Air in and you refused to take a look at it."

"Oh, I thought you said COMPUTER!" the PFY says.

It's not a computer, it's a fashion accessory.

*Where did the Paris Hilton icon go??

Chemical plant taken offline by the best one of all: C₈H₁₀N₄O₂

Java installation

I arrived at work one morning to be greeted with the news that "someone tried to install Java on one of the MFD printers, and it didn't work".

As I was pre-coffee myself, it took me a while to work out what they meant. When I got upstairs, I found that someone had put a pint of freshly brewed coffee on the sorter unit of the MFD (cost ~£20,000), and proceeded to print out their days instruction booklets. Whereupon the sorted had duly started moving up and and down rapidly, and spilled the pint of coffee into the printer.

Fortunately this user was only a partial idiot, and had turned the printer off to prevent anything too bad from happening... so I separated all the parts I could, and we dried as much as we could with paper towels, and then I raised a ticket with our printe management company. Who turned up a couple of hours later, and miraculously, nothing had gotten inside it.

It did smell nice for a couple of weeks though!

Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'

Re: Photocopier challange

This is an annoyance of mine. If you require instructions on how to use the parking brake, it's too complicated. Get rid of the stupid button, and put the big lever back in the middle of the car, where everyone knows what and where it is.

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Re: The d in £sd

Spare a talent for an old ex-leper?

Mouse hiding in cable tray cheesed off its bemused user

We used to do this...

When wireless mice first came out. Except they only had two channels, so if more than two people were using them, everyone's equipment quickly becamse useless.

And for a joke, when you were bored, you'd just change the channel on your mouse and move it around a lot and wait for the cries of surprise and annoyance from your colleagues.

Even better were the keyboards. Change the channel, and type something like "This is IT, your account has been suspended for watching too much porn"

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

We had a complete technophobe of a marketing director, back in around 2002, who never used his computer. He'd always come to us to dictate emails (despite none of us being secretaries), and when we asked him why, he complained that his computer was really old and slow. And to be fair, it was the last 486 in the building, so we ordered him a shiny new Pentium 3.

When it arrived, I took out his old computer, and he took the opportunity to rearrange his office a bit. Meaning that the new computer was now too far from the network port, and I needed to get a new cable. We didn't have any of the right length in stock, so I ordered some new ones, and told him that I'd be back to install the cable in the next couple of days.

Things happened, there was a weekend, and it was 6 weeks before he came back to me to say that his new computer didn't work... SIX WEEKS!

Reg readers tell us what they wanted for SysAdmin Appreciation Day

I got the same as most of you...

Absolutely sod all.

Microsoft warns Windows 10 patch broke printing for some

I don't see the problem

Just get rid of all your printers, and it's all fine.

A character catastrophe for a joker working his last day

The company I worked for acquired another smaller company, and after a few months closed them down, making everyone redundant.

When we turned up at the site to start collecting all the equipment up, one of the senior senior managers noticed a flashing light on a label printer, and asked someone what it meant. "Probably a paused print job", came the reply. So he pressed the button next to it, releasing a job of 5,000 labels saying "<company name> are c@nts!"

Highly amusing for everyone except the manager...

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

That's so stupid...

...it's almost brilliant

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

It's happened to me a few times...

I was in my office one day circa 2001, and "someone" came in and put a Zip disk (remember them?) into the drive of a computer used by someone who wasn't in that day. Then went back to their own desk.

Then I noticed the activity light flashing a lot, and being a nosy bugger (and not trusting this person a jot), I opened Windows Explorer and went to the Zip drive, and found that the disk was filling up with images of women who had clearly gotten too warm, and decided to remove all their clothing.

Screenshots were duly taken (of filenames, not the images), and information sent to HR & Management, whereupon the user in question claimed that he was "copying it for a friend who didn't have internet access). Management then decided that even though there was a precedent of sacking people caught doing this kind of thing, that he merely merited a warning.

Rufus and ExplorerPatcher: Tools to remove Windows 11 TPM pain and more

Re: Just goes to show..

"Why not just provide a mechanism to import group policies, convert them and apply them*?"

This, a million times over. Then my users who don't/don't know how/cba connect to the VPN will have their policies updated, and settings set.

A great day for non-robots: iOS 16 will bypass CAPTCHAs

That's lovely, but...

When will they give me a way to block cookies without having to click on "Reject All" on practically every single website I go on?

BOFH: Tech helps HR investigate the Boss's devices

Inspirational!

The BofH is a lesson for us all. Record every interaction with HR. And everyone else...

Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada

Thanks, I just had it stuffed!

Global pandemic was good for business, say UK infosec pros – but we're still burning out

Re: Telling times

I think we can all agree that all politicians were asleep during their history lectures, otherwise they wouldn't keep making the same mistakes over and over again...

Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively

Never mind 1-2-3

Bring back Ami Pro! I loved that so much more than Word.

Microsoft exposes glue-free guts of the Surface Laptop Studio

I've used Surface tablets, and much like Macbooks, they're hugely overpriced, and just seem to be fashion accessories, rather than actual computers.

Netflix to crack down on account sharing, offer ad-laden cheaper options

So many things wrong with the TV/Streaming model

It's partly due to naff content, partly that I've seen pretty much everything I want to watch from them over the last two years, and partly that although I have access to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Sky Movies and Disney Plus, there are still things that I can't get.

I'm not going to get any more subscriptions, especially when things disappear from them and someone else gets to decide what I can and can't watch. Everyone has suddenly decided that they need their own streaming service, and you can only view their content on that. I've had enough of them all, I want one service with access to all of them, so I can pick and choose the few shows/films I want to see, and not pay for all the rest of the dross that I will never watch.

Also, while I'm on a rant, how do Sky get away with charging you for access to channels, and then forcing you to watch adverts. If I'm paying for a service, I expect to get it without adverts. And if you insist on having adverts, then why am I paying for it?

Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows

I don't know about anyone else

But they're going to have to pay me a lot more to get up early and sit in traffic again. Time for companies to realise that work/life balance has to include the commute time too.

BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store

Poor Colin

I suspect we won't hear much from him again, as concrete is VERY good at muffling sound.

Allegedly.

BOFH: On Wednesdays, we wear gloves

Clever writing

Not a single actual threat, just the power of suggestion!

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

Several times...

The worst was a 400 mile round trip from Uxbridge to Newton Abbot to restart a server after someone swore they'd done it, only to find out they'd turned the monitor off and on again.

Boffins find way to use a standard smartphone to find hidden spy cams

Re: Thunderbird 1 had camera detection years ago

"Apparently at the script meetings they'd occasionally consider rescuing Alan from orbit, but always decided too leave him there to wank himself to death."

Odd, I don't recall that particular storyline...

Let us give thanks that this November, Microsoft has given us just 55 security fixes, two of which are for actively exploited flaws

Re: And they still haven't fixed network printing

No, the best fix for printers is to uninstall them, remove them from your offices, and use PDFs.

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

No, that was The Living Daylights, in 1987

Sharing is caring, except when it's your internet connection

Re: "What the neighbours made of their sudden disconnection is . ."

I've had that with a Powerline network. Was using it for a few months until one day everything seemed really slow, and I couldn't see my media server. so I went to the router, and found it was for Sky broadband, which surprised me as I was with BT at the time...

Google emits Chrome 94 with 'Idle Detection' API to detect user inactivity amid opposition

Fixed it

I couldn't find it in settings, but a spot of googling (ironically), led me to this:

chrome://settings/content/idleDetection

Then "don't allow sites to know when you're actively using your device".

I would drive 100 miles and I would drive 100 more just to be the man that drove 200 miles to... hit the enter key

We've all done it

I've had a 390 mile round trip from Uxbridge to Newton Abbot and back in a day, just to press return on a server. Mainly because this server was locked in a secure room, and I wasn't allowed to tell anyone on site the code for the door (the two people who did know were off sick or on holiday in the USA), and my colleagues in Chester worked out that I was closest to Newton Abbot, but only by a few miles.

Electron-to-joule conversion formulae? Cute. Welcome to the school of hard knocks

Re: Ask the dog - it has an 80% success rate

I do that with crossword clues. The act of reading the clue out loud makes you hear it as well as read it, and a different part of the brain thinks about it and bam you have the answer, often before you've finished reading the clue out, which annoys/frustrates everyone who's listening.

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

Re: me too

Was that in Disaster Area's stunt ship?

A practical demonstration of the difference between 'resilient' and 'redundant'

We've all done it...

Gone behind server racks and pulled plugs out with our backsides, only to find that the UPS was fine when plugged in, but miraculously failed as soon as power was removed, or even better, found out that the separate PDUs were both connected to the same UPS.

Oh! A surprise tour of the data centre! You shouldn't have. No, you really shouldn't have

I got chewed out on a Friday morning once for not answering the on-call phone the previous evening.

It turned out that the pub I'd gone to do the quiz at was in a dead-spot for phone signal on the network that the on-call phone was using, so it never rang. I filed that information away for further use in case I didn't want to take a call again in future...

D'oh! Misplaced chair shuts down nuclear plant in Taiwan

Re: it was always the (dry) cleaner

"doesn't the icon look like somebody working in one of them places?"

Only if you've caught your cleaners rifling through your coat pockets...